Description
Seventeen-year-old Jean, a troubled Jewish boy caught in the countercultural swirl of 1970s London, arrives at Compton Manor, a rural alternative boarding school for boys with problems. Dyslexic, antisocial, and prone to violent outbursts, Jean has never made friends easily and school has never been a place of safety or enjoyment.
Compton Manor is his last chance, but even here, despite the unconventional teaching methods, Jean is marked by difference. The other boys are fee-paying, while Jean is on a grant; they have good, English families, while Jeans mother, Rosa, is a German-Jewish refugee and his father is an absent memory. Having broken the rules several times, Jean is on thin ice. But there is only one summer to get through and then Jean will pass his exams and get out.
All of a sudden, he is befriended by Tomconfident, charming, buoyed by years of good breeding and privilegeand it seems as if Jeans world might change. When things turn romantic, Jean is tipped into a heady, overwhelming infatuation. Now Jean skips class to venture into the woods, or sneaks across moonlit fields to see Tom, wondering whether the relationship might offer a way out of a life marked by alienation. But what if the only true path to freedom is to disappear altogether
Spellbinding and evocative, Jean is a meditative narrative of loss and escape distilled into the heartrending story of an intense and dangerous adolescent love.
Author: Madeleine Dunnigan
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 01/13/2026
Pages: 224
ISBN: 9781324105640
Language: English
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